Flower Power

In “Camera Lucida,” Roland Barthes distinguished a photograph’s studium—its interpretable matter—from its punctum—the piercing detail that touches the viewer at a personal pleasure point. In “The Blue Dahlia,” the 1946 film noir that Raymond Chandler scripted and George Marshall directed, the studium—something to do with Alan Ladd as a war veteran who comes home to find his wife running around with another man and a resulting murder mystery—has receded from memory, or, rather, has melted together with aspects of “The Best Years of Our Lives,” from the same year, in which Dana Andrews plays a veteran with the same problem, minus the murder. (Another overlap is that both feature the husky, gravel-voiced William Bendix as a soldier returning home—in “The Blue Dahlia,” one suffering from mental damage as a result of a head wound.) The punctum: the unctuous baritone of Howard Da Silva, the gangster with whom the soldier’s wife was straying. Upon reading that title, I hear his voice in an unshakably Pavlovian association. That, and the vision of his pencil-thin mustache that follows, comprise the exemplary cinematic incarnation of sleaze. (As an added attraction, a romantic role for the husky-voiced, elusive Veronica Lake.) It’s not available on DVD; it is on TCM tonight, at 2:15 A.M. E.T.

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